Effectiveness Courses

Skills for getting along and getting ahead.

Our effectiveness courses focus on the key skills and approaches which compliment the contemporary professional’s technical skills. We avoid references to ‘soft skills’, as these interpersonal skills are key to thriving in an interdependent workplace.

Within the effectiveness training theme, we make a distinction between courses focusing on developing others and courses focused on leading others.

Developing Others

Developing others is all about giving professionals the key skills in people development to make them rounded and effective managers. We emphasise development as an ongoing dialogue, rather than just the scheduled events required by the organisation. This is particularly reflected in our coaching skills training courses.

Leading Others

The ‘Leading others’ workshops focus on what managers need to be able to do for their teams – manage relationships, manage change, built trust, provide effective feedback and foster creativity and innovation.

Developing Others

Our ‘Developing others’ workshops give managers (new and more experienced) the skills required to maintain a development focus in their team and to contribute to a coaching culture in their organisation. Whether it’s coaching with a ‘big’ or ‘small’ C, it represents an invaluable addition to the managerial toolkit.

‘Flourish’ – Developing others at work

This one-day workshop covers the essentials of developing team members, including identifying development needs, having development conversations and providing performance feedback. The workshop includes introductory coaching skills to support these crucial conversations.

Introduction to Workplace Coaching

This two-day course has been developed for managers, team leaders and HR professionals who wish to learn the basics of workplace coaching. No prior experience is assumed and a pre-reading pack brings delegates to a level playing field in terms of concepts. We cover practical coaching skills, ethics and professionalism and the particular challenges and benefits of being an in-house coaching professional.

Coaching Masterclasses

Our coaching masterclass series is a collection of one-day in-depth sessions, focusing on a single theme. They are suitable for workplace coaches with significant training and experience and cover topics like, workplace stress, productivity, transition and change and preparation for retirement. They represent excellent CPD opportunities for experienced in-houses coaches.

‘Dialogues’ – Introducing coaching conversations

The ‘Dialogues’ workshop is perfect for managers who don’t need to operate as fully-fledged workplace coaches, but who recognise the value that a coaching- style approach can have. Highly practical and interactive, this workshop includes a significant amount of practice coaching.

Advanced Workplace Coaching

This two-day course is a follow-up to our introductory course and equips delegates with an introduction to the more advanced ‘cognitive-behavioural’ approach to coaching. This is particularly useful for challenges that are more about beliefs than behaviour or skills. With plenty of in-course practice, workplace coaches will leave with the addition of some significant tools to their coaching toolkit.

“We retained WorkLifePsych to design and deliver workshops on essential coaching skills to the delegates on our “Inspire” leadership development programme. Richard worked closely with us to identify our requirements and ensured that he reflected our company’s culture in the final version of the workshop.

I would have no hesitation in recommending WorkLifePsych as a provider of coaching skills and development interventions more generally and I look forward to working with Richard again.”

Louise Morris - Talent & Development LeadCertas Energy

Leading Others

Our ‘Leading others’ workshops are all about key managerial and leadership skills required of professionals in the modern workplace.

Delegates learn how to bring the best of themselves to a variety of organisational challenges and contexts.

'Getting along vs getting ahead' - relationships at work

This workshop is focused on practice relationship management and strategic stakeholder management. Rather than allowing our workplace relationships to develop in a haphazard way, delegates will learn how to plan this crucial activity, learn more about their key stakeholder and what they need. The course also covers interpersonal challenges such as conflict in the workplace, the importance of personal brand and values and the role of organisational politics.

‘Speak up and speak out’ – developing psychological safety in teams

Psychological safety is all about feeling comfortable in speaking up – highlighting errors, making suggestions or calling attention to risks. Teams with high levels of psychological safety are higher performing teams, but it needs to be nurtured and developed. This course outlines the ingredients required for team members to feel truly psychological safe and the role the team leader has in shaping this.

‘Pioneers’ – fostering innovation at work

Innovation and creativity are different, yet related. Taking a creative idea through the innovation process requires openness to change, resilience persistence and psychological flexibility. This workshop focuses on the thinking skills required by managers to ensure their team can innovate effectively.

‘Perspectives’ – leading flexible teams

Flexible working arrangements can meet the needs of both employer and employee on a number of levels. But these arrangements require a different approach from managers and team leaders. Trust, flexibility, psychological safety and communication become more important than ever. This workshop gives managers the frameworks and tools to effectively lead their flexibly working team.

‘Transitions’ – leading others through change

With workplace change a virtual constant, we can either sit back and allow change to be ‘done to us’, or as managers and leaders we can lead our team members through it successfully. This workshop explores how people respond to change, how to communicate change authentically and the management techniques to harness resistance and support.

‘Let’s talk’ – difficult conversations at work

Discomfort with difficult conversations can mean we procrastinate about them or we sugar-coat them to avoid being the ‘bad guy’. ‘Difficult’ is a relative term, but can include feedback about performance and development needs, as well as career planning and trajectory. The workshop focuses on minimising the role of discomfort, while maximising authenticity, planning and empathy to get the best result.

‘Contact’ – leading virtual teams

The significant growth of virtual teams in the last ten years has
had benefits of employer and employee alike. However, when teams spend
less time in the same space and are sometimes separated by time zones
and geography, the onus is on the manager to adapt their approach. This has implications for management style, focus and relationships. This workshop gives managers a framework to use with their team to ensure that distance doesn’t become a barrier to effective team functioning.

Bite-sized Learning

Bite-size learning to boost your effectiveness

These 90 minute workshops represent an interactive and impactful way to introduce key effectiveness concepts to your employees. Designed to fit in with ‘learn at lunch’ or offsite gatherings, the sessions are designed to capture delegates’ attention and cover skills they can put into use immediately.

When operational arrangements mean day-long workshops aren’t practical, our Effectiveness Essentials sessions are a fantastic alternative. And for geographically-distributed teams, all of our Essentials sessions can be delivered remotely via webinar. Just get in touch to find out more.

Coaching Essentials

An interactive introduction to introducing coaching-style conversations at work. Ideal for team leaders and junior managers, we explore how coaching conversations can boost capability and independence and cover the core components of a confident coaching stance.

Feedback Essentials

Timely and well-constructed feedback is an essential ingredient for any team, yet many people shy away from it – for a variety of reasons. This impactful session covers the core components of quality feedback and gives delegates the chance to action-plan their next feedback conversation.

Developing Psychological Safety

Psychological Safety is all about a shared perspective that it’s safe to speak up, speak out and deviate from the group perspective. This session introduces team leaders and managers to the critical factors they need to build to ensure team members feel psychologically safe to highlight errors, potential improvements and risks they identify.

Delegation Essentials

A core skill for team leaders and managers, delegation isn’t always approached with the correct mindset. A lack of clarity, poor communication and assumptions can combine to create disappointment and frustrations. This workshop outlines some of the major delegation pitfalls to avoid and describes how to overcome the challenges the delegating manager can face.

The Value of Values

This session explores our ‘inner compass’, the set of beliefs that guide our behaviour: our values. Often neglected or misunderstood, we can use our values to navigate challenges, make important decisions and persist towards our most valued goals. This session will help delegates clarify what really matters and show them how to make values a daily habit, not an aspiration ‘maybe someday’ experience.

The Power of Conversation

This session explores the importance of conversation in the workplace. From brief social chats, through to formal appraisals and interviews – conversation sits at the heart of our interpersonal experiences and our feelings of connectedness with others. In this workshop, we explore the factors that contribute to good quality conversation, the benefits it brings to the individual and the team, and the common pitfalls to avoid along the way.

Relationships 101

Effective relationship management is a critical professional skill in the contemporary work environment – nobody works in a bubble! This interactive session looks at ways delegates can proactively identify and development their key stakeholder relationships.

Goal-setting for Success

Goal-setting is one of the few psychological principles that works in all contexts, yet it’s still misunderstood in many organisations. This session takes delegates through the psychology of goal-setting and illustrates the importance of personality, values, behaviour change and organisational context when goals are being formulated.

Managing Difficult Conversations

Putting off or avoiding a seemingly ‘difficult’ conversation is rarely a helpful course of action. This session explores what constitutes a difficult conversation, why we can tend to avoid them and how to address the discomfort they invoke. Essential for managers and team leaders who want to discuss performance and give effective feedback on behaviour at work.

The Power of Habit

When we want to make changes to our routines and behaviours, we can often over-reach, aim too high and then look back with disappointment when the changes fail to materialise. This workshop unlocks the power of habits and how they can shape our days, but also progress towards landmark goals and the representation of our personal values.

Managing Boundaries

Effective professionals occupy a number of roles in life and a simple focus on work vs life over-simplifies things. Understanding how we can proactively manage and navigate our boundaries helps avoid overwhelm in one domain and neglect in another. Get clear on your roles, your focus and how you’ll be the kind of person you really want to be by learning how to manage your boundaries.